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Song Of The Day 2/8/2016: Fats Domino – “Lady Madonna”

Quarterly Covers Report – Let's be honest: Efforts by the old guard of rock and roll to pay respect to the Beatles weren't always outright successes. Many times the new guard wasn't so great at it either. Hell, it still wasn't easy to get it right years after they broke up. The other day my personal friend and part-time emotional chiropractor Brooks Martin posted a 15-minute Beatles medley from a 1977 Rolling Stone TV special that should have revoked the performance rights of almost everyone involved, including Ted Neeley and the guy in the Nixon mask who sheepishly mugged to the tune of "I'm a Loser." It's the kind of thing that makes you wish time machines weren't just figments of H.G. Wells' imagination, that they were real and you could go back in time to prevent terrible things from happening, like the invention of television.

Fats Domino's version of "Lady Madonna," however, is not one of those travesties. It's pretty good, even if he doesn't really change too much in the matters of instrumentation, just throwing in a bit of a rhythm switch-up in the first verse. Fats' capability on this version probably shouldn't be that much of a surprise, as Paul McCartney wrote "Lady Madonna" in an effort to emulate Fats' boogie-woogie piano and singing. Fats' cover hit the charts in 1968, spending two weeks at #100 then dropping off completely. It was the New Orleans legend's last chart hit in America.